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Burn address

Inherited from Incognito Chain

Written by the Incognito Core Developers. It describes the design Zephyrium started from; where Zephyrium differs, Differences from Incognito is authoritative.

  • Burn address: is a special address on Incognito chain, which is not accessible by anyone, since no one owns the private keys to that address.

  • Burned assets (coins or tokens): mean eliminated assets by sending them to a burn address.

  • Minted assets (coins or tokens): mean created new assets then distributed them to some address on Incognito chain.

In Incognito chain, we use "burn and mint mechanism" to archive consensus in some cases such as stake/unstake, deposit/withdraw token in the bridge, and pDEX.

How to generate Burn Address​

  • The formula to generate burn address is as follows:

                    Hash(G, "burningaddress", index)

    where

    • Keccak256 is used as the hash function,
    • G is the base point of Edwards25519,
    • "burningaddress" is a hard code string,
    • index is the minimum positive integer number such that the last byte of output is zero (it will make sure that burn address belongs in Shard 0).

  • The burn address at index = 68 in base58encode is: 15pGE5XZc7gsHSLgQxgZRVt7UsXBodiyTYe6xtvXipTFQPMpdQqtXhkzriL

Why no one can recompute the private key​

Based on two assumptions:

  • Function Hash is one-way and unpredictable, the output of Hash is an unpredictable point H=xG
  • To recover the private key x, we need to solve the discrete log problem. The probabilistic to solve the discrete log problem on Edward25519 is negligible.

Thus, no one can recompute the private key.

Reference​

[1] https://github.com/levietcuong2602/incognito-chain/blob/dev/master/utility/generateburnaddress.go

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